Comment by grogenaut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grogenaut | Hacker News Reader

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I live in the burbs, I also live .25 miles from the grocery. When it's just me and my spouse I'm happy to walk it, we do that on our daily walk anyway. When it's me, my SO, my son, and his SO which it has been all of the pandemic and after... it's too much to carry. Way Way too much for my SO to carry who likes to do the shopping. Car gets it done easily.

I lived about 3 blocks from a grocery in a downtown core for 10 years and rarely drove and walked it then. It was actually more of a hassle. My mom lived about 5 miles away. She'd pick me up on Sundays and we'd go shop. She'd cook dinner then drop me off at my apartment in that downtown core. This was a lot better.

Basically the car was great for the stuff you buy a bit more of and walking is great to pick up the stuff you want for this meal. Then again there were 5 restaurants on my walk from work to home so I just ate out all the time.

Most places are also not SF weather wise. This was in downtown St. Louis. It would be 85-90 the warm part of the year and sub 40 the rest of the year. Walking with heavy grocery bags in that weather or in winter requires changing clothes. Or pop in the car and get more moved and no sweat (literally). You go 5 blocks with a granny grocery cart in 95 weather and you'll need a shower when you get home.

I agree that once kids are in the mix "walk everywhere" gets more challenging.

There are more savvy ways to do it though, like getting stuff delivered - it's not a dichotomy between carrying stuff everywhere and hauling it in a car. It is a bit painful at first to get used to paying an extra $5-10 here and there for delivery, but it's nothing in comparison to the cost of a car, not to mention the time it saves. Any time something is heavy enough that I dread carrying it I just get it delivered (which for groceries, I generally do once every 1-2 weeks).

Of course there are a lot of caveats, like using specific delivery services which don't create headaches or charge exorbitant prices. I hate hate hate substitutions/when something is out of stock, but it essentially never happens with Amazon Fresh or Food Rocket (a startup in SF), is rare for Whole Foods, and mildly infrequent with Safeway - none of which have extra markup for delivered goods beyond a transparent delivery fee. I've heard too many horror stories about Instacart or other services to even bother though.

As an aside, that is something I've noticed about car ownership, that people treat all the costs as its own thing without looking at the marginal cost it adds to the various things they do. When deciding to go carless, that was one of the strongest arguments tipping me over. Just what I was paying in insurance and gas was enough to cover all my delivery fees and public transit costs.

Delivery is to carless as AWS Lambda is to serverless. There is no delivery, there is only someone else's car.

But there is much more efficient use of the car. Instead of a personal vehicle spending 99% of its time parked, a delivery van/truck spends 25% of its time making deliveries. They can be routed efficiently to deliver from a hub location to a group of homes.

But once you have a family, that's just not factored into the price. If at about a family of 4 (mine's 5), public transport becomes more expensive than driving a car and renting parking even to go into the city center. Frankly, in the suburbs a car is cheaper even for 1 person. There are some other usable ways to get around (electric scooters, the kind you sit down on) are becoming popular for a good reason.

So I wonder about this increased efficiency. Most modes of transportation, as well as rental prices, are priced per-person. A car helps enormously, especially as the number of people increases. Plus cheaper groceries, cheaper access to everything from furniture to woods, ...

If there's any truth to capitalism, efficiency, when it comes down to it, is price. So for families, even small ones, I think we're dismissing the idea that suburbs are the most efficient possible too quickly.

There's a difference between cars only being used for delivery and everybody going around in a car by themselves. It's like the equivalent of a bus.

Do you think that in places like Hong Kong or New York that there are no delivery vehicles?

I'm pretty aware of the costs of vehicles and delivery. I can afford the vehicles. When I need them they're way easier than hiring a vehicle. I have hobbies you can't fit into an Uber, such as a plasma cutter, and forget renting a U-Haul to look at a lathe or cnc.

I biked everywhere for 7 years when I moved to Seattle, 2800 miles a year. Still was very nice to have the car.

If I feel like snowboarding I can just go. Which was highly dependent on work, especially night skiing, which you can't Uber to, and the one bust required me to only go on Saturday with 4 hour overhead and a 30 minutes Uber in the wrong direction. The opportunity cost of all that planning is worth the $2000 I spend a year on licensing and insuring my vehicles. Gas is gas be it Uber or my car.

Not everyone fits into one mold.

If I have to get deliveries with someone else's car then I've just externalized the car but I'm still very car dependent

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